Table 1.
Neuroimaging studies of ‘psychopathy’
| First author | Year | Title | Type of imaging | Type of analysis | PCL-R cutoff for P | Mean PCL-R for P's | P sample size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birbaumer | 2005 | Deficient fear conditioning in psychopathy:a functional magnetic resonance imaging study | F | BG | 15 | 24.9 | 10 |
| Boccardi | 2009 | Abnormal hippocampal shape in offenders with psychopathy | S | BG | 30 | 34.6 | 12 |
| Buckholtz | 2010 | Mesolimbic dopamine reward system hypersensitivity in individuals with psychopathic traits | F | C/R | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Craig | 2009 | Altered connections on the road to psychopathy | S | BG, C/R | 25 | 28.4 | 9 |
| Deeley | 2006 | Facial emotion processing in criminal psychopathy. Preliminary functional magnetic resonance imaging study | F | BG | 25 | 29.3 | 6 |
| Glenn | 2009 | The neural correlates of moral decision-making in psychopathy | F | C/R | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Glenn | 2010 | Increased volume of the striatum in psychopathic individuals | S | BG | 23 | 27.2 | 22 |
| Gordon | 2004 | Functional differences among those high and low on a trait measure of psychopathy | F | BG | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Intrator | 1997 | A brain imaging (single photon emission computerized tomography) study of semantic and affective processing in psychopaths | F | BG | 25 | 29.9 | 8 |
| Kiehl | 2001 | Limbic abnormalities in affective processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging | F | BG | 24 | 32.8 | 8 |
| Kiehl | 2004 | Temporal lobe abnormalities in semantic processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging | F | BG | 29 | 32.8 | 8 |
| Laakso | 2001 | Psychopathy and the posterior hippocampus | S | C/R | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Muller | 2003 | Abnormalities in emotion processing within cortical and subcortical regions in criminal psychopaths: evidence from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using pictures with emotional content | F | BG | 31 | 36.8 | 6 |
| Muller | 2008 | Gray matter changes in the right superior temporal gyrus in criminal psychopaths. Evidence from voxel-based morphometry | S | BG | 29 | 33.4 | 17 |
| Muller | 2008 | Disturbed prefrontal and temporal brain function during emotion and cognition interaction in criminal psychopathy | F | BG | 28 | 30.5 | 10 |
| Raine | 2003 | Corpus callosum abnormalities in psychopathic antisocial individuals | S | BG, C/R | 23 | 30.3 | 15 |
| Rilling | 2007 | Neural correlates of social cooperation and non-cooperation as a function of psychopathy | F | C/R | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Veit | 2009 | Aberrant social and cerebral responding in a competitive reaction time paradigm in criminal psychopaths | F | C/R | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Yang | 2009 | Localization of deformations within the amygdala in individuals with psychopathy | S | BG, C/R | 23 | 28.0 | 27 |
Abbreviations: BG, between-group analysis; C/R, correlation or regression analysis; F, functional; N/A, not applicable or data not available; P, psychopathy; PCL-R, Psychopathy Checklist-Revised; S, structural.